802.11me

An Open Letter to The Lorax

Dude,

Just got done re-reading your book and would like to get a couple things off my chest. For starters, that Brown Bar-ba-loot on page 12 is definitely dead. My daughter asked me if he was sleeping, but i'm not going to start lying to five year olds, so I told her, "Oh no, sweetie, he's dead." I think this fact is meant to slip by barely noticed, but the bar-ba-loot in question has X's for eyes, and "X-eyes" is cartoon for dead.

Thanks to the stash of chocolate covered everythings I keep by her bed, my daughter had no sooner wiped away her tears than she was asking some fairly pointed questions: "Why did the Lorax let the bar-ba-loots die?", she wondered. Indeed. I'm sure if pressed, you would resort to your usual handwringing and fingerpointing; "The Once-ler's a bad guy", "don't cut down that tree", "you made all the fish sick", "stop killing the bar-ba-loots", but where are the actions to match these words, my little friend? Was it not clear from day one that The Once-ler was a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist hell-bent on profit? Could you not have formulated some sort of reforestation plan for the Truffula Trees long before The Once-ler's super axe hackers chopped down the last of these stately beauties? It's all well and good to say you speak for the trees, but talk is cheap, my man. The trees and fish and birds and bears that you supposedly represent didn't fare so well on your steady diet of bitch, bitch, bitch, did they?

Here's the deal. Popping out of a tree stump and lifting yourself up by the ass and flying away are neat parlor tricks, but in the end, it's the gritty work of planting new trees, petitioning congress, and getting some 8x10 glossies of dying bar-ba-loots to the Times that could have turned the tide in your favor. Gandhi didn't liberate India by sitting around his house moaning "the English are being mean to me", capiche?

I have to hand it to you; despite your Hamlet-esque inability to take action, your incessant whining, and a handlebar mustache that qualifies you as an immediate finalist for the Village People tribute band, you still got the book named after you. In a treatise that should clearly be titled, "The Rise and Fall of the Once-ler: A Man and his Thneeds", you managed to steal the headline despite appearing in only 12% of the book, as compared to The Once-ler's 88% and the kid's 20%. I'd love to get the name of your publicist.

Yours in frustration,

Dick Costolo